Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Burn, baby, burn

Winter weeds are spring up all over our place and, being certified organic, the best ways to get rid of them are hand weeding, or flaming. Flaming is far faster but has it's limitations, the biggest of which is that if you let the weeds get away from you, the torch won't get rid of them. It just singes the tops. The flame is fabulous on just-emerged seedlings and progressively less so as the plants gain in size.Unfortunately, no flaming was accomplished yesterday because this farmer forgot how to hook up the flamer hose to the propane tank's valve spigot. Sounds rudimentary, but maybe not as much as it appears. As it turns out, there are inside and outside threads! So yesterday it was hand weeding as my tender brain processed this problem. And then, this morning, I had an epiphany! Strangely, this IS the Epiphany, the day according to Christians when the Christ child was revealed to the world, or at least the Three Wise Men who had travelled from afar. So today, those pesky weeds -- like the ones under my shoes in the big photo -- will have a fiery adversary. And I will have fiery farming fun! And I may be kicking myself with one of those steel-toed shoes in the big picture for not figuring it out yesterday!!